Creeds and Confessions

One of the places of controversy in my denomination is the questions of creeds vs. confessions and the role of either in the life of the church.

Any person who has grown up in one of the liturgical churches is familiar with the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed. These documents were meant as condensations of faith... if you knew them and believed everything that was in them, you were part of the in-crowd, the church. In spite of Glenn Layne's statement in his blog, that we have "a robust creedal core to our faith," The earliest Baptists and all true Baptists since then have rejected creeds. They did this for a number of reasons: 1. You can't boil all of faith down to a three paragraph statement. 2. That God works contextually and who knows, God may have something else that is required of you where you are. 3.Nobody can tell someone else what they must believe. Faith is always between God and the individual.

The early Baptists did have confessions though. It may sound like mincing words, but the difference is huge. While creeds are prescriptive, confessions are descriptive. Creeds represented a list of things you had to believe dictated by a bunch of elite. Confessions were consensus documents hammered out by a community that said, this is what we believe right now, all of us. Confessions were used for discipline but only because the individual being disciplined had already agreed to the content. Indeed, the individual being disciplined or at least their community had a part in producing the document. And confessions were always "written in pencil." That is, there was always an expectation that it would change.

A confession becomes a creed when it is imposed upon folk who had either no role in producing it or were not part of the consensus. As you can imagine, with any group with over a million members, reaching consensus on anything is next to impossible. Confessions are next to impossible except in the broadest terms.

Any document that comes from the American Baptist General Board that adds new criteria for churches to be a part of the body is a creed... and as I said in an earlier blog, there is no place for creedalism in the Baptist tradition.